It can be difficult to take video games seriously. A lot of us, of course, have convinced ourselves that we do – otherwise the hundreds of hours we’ve invested in them over the years seem all the more pitifully squandered. But a faint halo of shame still clings to the pastime.

If a non-gaming loved one happens to pass by the Playstation while you’re slogging through another round of Destiny, as your droning robot sidekick commands you to “lure out the Vex Gate Lord that protects the Endless Steps and bring its head back to the Awoken,” you feel as though you’ve been caught clammy-palmed in your mother’s basement, drooling over a half-eaten bag of Cheetos and a 20-sided die. There isn’t much dignity in Vex Gate Lords.

As an artistic experience, most video games are weighed down by unnecessary baggage – the excess geekery that pads a story out to 20 or 30 hours, an obligation of a $60 price tag. Even the most vaunted exponents of gaming’s high brow suffer from this irritating deference to convention. The much celebrated Bioshock, for all its Art Deco opulence and objectivist swagger, still consists mainly of tinkering in weapon-upgrade submenus and repeatedly shooting samey-looking zombies in the face.

There’s a story – a pretty good one about the corruption of power and the dark side of the American dream – that’s doled out in small chunks between item-scavenging busywork and interminable firefights. The artistic experience in this case is more like a special feature; a reward for enduring the spectacle. It can often seem like gameplay itself is the average video game’s major impediment to artistry.

Silent Hill 2, one of the greatest video games, is great precisely for the way that it’s unlike other games. There’s no busywork, no side-missions, no shooting or killing or looting for its own sake. There isn’t even a HUD: you have to pause the game just to check your character’s health, as if any gameplay convention at all would have been one too many to break the immersive spell.

In short, Silent Hill 2 is a video game largely shorn of the traditional video game excess, the nerdy stats-based trimmings that put us less in mind of cinema or literature than of LARPing or pen-and-paper RPGs. And most importantly, the story told by Silent Hill 2 isn’t draped inelegantly over the gameplay, as it is in something like Bioshock. The story is the main event, served by the gameplay rather than the other way around.

The premise of Silent Hill 2 – a sequel by name and setting only – is refreshingly simple. James Sunderland, a middle-aged widower, has received an inexplicable letter from his wife, who succumbed to an illness years before. The letter asks James to return to her in the town of Silent Hill. You guide James on a quest to find the source of the letter, but it soon transpires that Silent Hill, entirely depopulated and perennially shrouded in fog, is more spiritual purgatory than sea-side haven. Mummified nurses shuffle around a decaying hospital, a grim reminder of James’s wife’s last months. Animated mannequins lurk in a disused apartment complex, a grotesque caricature of domesticity. Issues are being worked through here; themes are being articulated. These foes aren’t merely ghoulish for the hell of it: they are manifestations of what turns out to be James’s guilt over his wife’s death, which proves rather more complicated than it initially seems.

More refreshingly still is the fact that the game refuses to indulge the player’s desire to play it as most games. Convention dictates that you ought to spend a lot of time plugging away at bosses or chopping down baddies for points. Not so here. These enemies don’t give you experience points, upgrades or even standard pickups like health packs and ammo. There is no benefit to fighting in this game.

Brazenly, Silent Hill 2 would prefer you to run away. It’s part of the brilliance of the game that its hero, a man afraid to face up to his personal demons, should be woefully under equipped to handle them in the flesh.

There’s a certain dignity in that fear, in the truth of it. We’ve left the realm of the super-nerdy. We’ve come upon something better: art.

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